Nolan begins by embracing the genre’s major tropes (dead child, plucky journalist, family secrets) only to turn their governing logics against them with prosecutorial persistence and precision. This is a murder mystery in which there is little mystery about the murder, a page-turner in which the suspense hinges less on what happened than on how and why certain people become the people to whom such things happen ... Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is ... Nolan’s vision is grim but not hopeless, unflinching yet uncynical.
Though the novel concludes — perhaps not entirely persuasively — on a note of hope, this fierce and relentless account of a family in crisis is almost unbearably bleak.
The third-person perspective switches between characters and sometimes these switches are clumsily executed. And that’s it, for me, in the deficit column: a minor quibble, and a small price to pay for the rich complexity of those multiple viewpoints. That duty discharged, I can proceed with a clear conscience to rave about Megan Nolan’s fiction again ... What most impresses about Nolan’s new novel is how different it is from her previous one; here is a writer looking to extend her range ... It is not an ambitious novel, nor an issues novel with a flashy USP. Nolan has set out to make a plain three-legged stool rather than an ornate grandfather clock. The corridors of contemporary literature are stuffed with grandfather clocks with faulty mechanisms. How much more valuable is this modest, well-made thing — from a writer who may well go on to amaze us with a fully functioning timepiece.
Nolan paints a horribly compelling, more narrative-driven tale ... Nolan’s telling of their stories is page-turning and written with aching, compassionate insight. Each account leaves your heartstrings taut as cheese wire.
A considerably more interesting book than it claims to be ... The overall effect is claustrophobic and relentlessly melancholic, but that is not to say that the novel is one-note. It is testament to Nolan’s ability as a writer that she is able to wring so much nuance and power out of an emotional palette consisting mostly of greys and blues. Ordinary Human Failings is an achievement of shade and texture ... Deeply tender.
A commentary on form—a tabloid story told as a novel stretches and deepens, grows sadder and stranger and less sensational. It is, in this way, a novel in defense of the novel. The difference between tragedies scandalous and standard is more in circumstance and structure than in kind ... The novel is deeply concerned with the relationship between inner privacy and outward appearance, with what it means to be good or bad, and what, in the equation, is the balance between one’s private estimation and the judgment of others.
Through her skillful exploration of the burdens imposed by inertia and inadequacy, Nolan illuminates the link to tragedies both commonplace and exceptional.
Where Nolan’s heart lies shows in the final product: she finds her stride in the family portrait, with the Greens – sympathetic despite their flaws – well-rendered ... The tabloid storyline is less compelling, and an encounter between Tom and Carmel, which feels like an attempt to bring the book’s two strands together, strikes a brief false note. Far better to approach Ordinary Human Failings as literary fiction than as a whodunnit.
...carries the author’s essential voice into new and familiar territories ... Yet billing this story as a whodunit thriller is a disjustice to Nolan’s astute understanding of character psychology and political landscapes ... Each introspective passage, too, peels away at a larger picture hidden beyond the individual. Nolan is careful to expose the circumstances of societal structures that harm these characters ... The ultimate draw of the novel is a recurring fascination in Nolan’s work: the notion of personal context and how it shapes a human life.
Nolan has excelled herself: Ordinary Human Failings is a raw, pulsing thing... A writer who's still at the start of what promises to be a splendid career ... a bold and beautiful second novel... daring in all the right ways, but compassionate when it needs to be.
In narration often possessing an archness akin to Otessa Moshfegh’s, Nolan presents the Greens as a benighted bunch. The mood is reminiscent of the tenacious bleakness of her equally booze-soaked debut, Acts of Desperation ... Pathos, melancholy, self-loathing and regret, then, are very much the orders of the day here. And at times this can make the reading experience feel a little unrewarding. But the compassion Nolan feels for her beleaguered cast sustains our engagement.
Journalist Tom, however, isn’t granted these nuances. He comes across as a cartoonish and caricatured Machiavellian ... Richie remembers thinking it 'was a beautiful thing as well as an ugly one.' With its fearless probing of darker human impulses, and its occasional lapses in characterization, perhaps this is an apt summation of Nolan’s novel, too.
Insightful if lugubrious ... Though the gloomy subject matter makes for rough going, Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes.
As you turn the pages, anxious to learn the truth about Lucy and Mia, the story seems to mock your very interest in it: Aren’t you, too, enthralled by the scandal, entranced by these front-page-worthy girls and their pigtailed barbarity? Suffused with empathy, Nolan’s novel expertly illuminates the parts of ourselves we try to keep in the dark.
